In Her Own Right : The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (41 page)

Stanton had undertaken this eighteen-month odyssey in an effort to renew her ties with her children. Despite her well-known charm and wit, her reconciliation efforts were sometimes awkward. “As we had not met in several years, it took us a long time, in the network of life, to pick up all the stitches that had dropped since we parted,” she recalled, referring to her visit with Gerrit. “I amused myself darning stockings and drawing plans for an addition to his house.” Soon she could report that she had been “receptioned and photographed” as well.
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Stanton made the effort because she thought she might die soon, loved her children and adored her grandchildren, and relished the role of matriarch. Being the head of her geographically extended family appealed to her sense of dominion. It was her granddaughter Nora Blatch who first referred to Stanton as the “Queen Mother,” both because of her rotund
resemblance to Queen Victoria and because of her regal self-regard. For Stanton, the adjective “queenly” had always been the highest accolade, applied only to admirable women like her mother and Lucretia Mott. She accepted the title.

Always dressed in black silk, her tight white curls under a lace cap, blue eyes twinkling, Stanton was the picture of the wise and witty American grandmother. Newspapers hailed her as the “Grand Old Woman of America.” It was an image she exploited to legitimize her reform career and camouflage her radical theology. Grace Greenwood, the popular author and reporter, saw through Stanton’s disguise. “Stately Mrs. Stanton has secured much immunity by a comfortable look of motherliness and a sly benignancy in her smiling eyes, even though her arguments have been bayonet thrusts and her words gun shots.”
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Stanton’s radical rhetoric abounded with maternal metaphors: women seeking equal rights were “the mothers of the race.”

The “cult of motherhood” in nineteenth-century America was “nearly as sacred as democracy.” Motherhood gave women an unassailable claim to “authority and prestige” as well as an occupation from which one did not retire.
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As mothers became grandmothers, respect increased and responsibility decreased. Furthermore, theories of motherhood were used by Stanton and others to justify conventionally unmaternal pursuits, like suffrage. For Stanton, the cult of motherhood enhanced her matriarchal role: it provided personal satisfaction, public esteem, political utility, and independence in her old age.

Mrs. Stanton spent the last few weeks of 1889 in the Dansville Sanitorium in upstate New York. “I decided to go . . . and see what Doctors James and Kate Jackson could do for me,” to reduce her weight and increase her energy. After six weeks of “rubbings, pinchings, steamings, Swedish movements, dieting, massage, [and] electricity,” she had lost only five pounds.
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Stanton’s obesity was becoming a serious problem. Photographs over a forty-year span record the growth of her girth from petite to plump to overweight to obese. After 1870 Stanton looked fat. Seven childbirths, a big appetite, and her refusal to wear corsets contributed to the problem. In 1860 she admitted weighing 175 pounds but did not seem embarrassed by her size. By the 1870s her bulk had become a handicap. Though she could no longer ride horseback, she remained agile. Her interest in food is evident in her letters from the lyceum circuit. Although she had once been a nutrition-conscious Grahamite, in her maturity she craved cream, sugar, butter, and biscuits. She liked to eat and she ate a lot, despite her claims of moderation. As her occupations became more sedentary in the
1880s, her weight spread. Writing from Iowa in 1888 she confessed to Libby Miller that she had to be weighed on a hay scale: “I have one melancholy fact to state which I do with sorrow and humiliation. I was weighed yesterday and brought the scales down at 240, just the speed of a trotting horse, and yet I cannot trot 100 feet without puffing. As soon as I reach Omaha, I intend to commence dieting. Yet I am well; danced the Virginia reel with Bob. But alas! I am 240! Pray for your lumbering Julius.”
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In the 1890s Stanton’s enormous bulk resulted in lameness, heart disease, and immobility.

During her travels in the 1880s Stanton had paid little attention to the organizational details of suffrage politics. Whenever Anthony asked for a speech or a convention call, Stanton complied, but Anthony asked less often. Anthony enjoyed the freedom of operation permitted by Stanton’s absence. Concerned that Mrs. Stanton, the nominal president of the National, had not even kept up her membership, Anthony used four hundred dollars from lecture fees to buy life memberships for herself, Mrs. Stanton, and two of her real nieces.
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Anthony preferred to keep Stanton out of the negotiations that were under way to merge the National and the American Suffrage associations. While Stanton disapproved of the conservative attitudes of most of the participants, she was willing to accept reunion. Antagonism had been “distracting,” she explained to a colleague. “In union [there is] added strength as well as an immense saving in money and forces.”
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She chose to believe that it was the American Association that wanted to join forces with the National, so she assented to the merger. She did nothing to disrupt the negotiations.

Following collaboration for the International Council and the formation of the National Council of Women, plans for the merger had developed rapidly. In October 1888 the American Association directed Lucy Stone to confer with Susan Anthony. Stone insisted that Anthony come to Boston to meet her. The two former adversaries agreed to appoint a joint committee “to confer.”
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The chief negotiators were Lucy Stone’s daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell, and Anthony’s “niece,” Rachel Foster Avery. Each woman was secretary of her Association; each represented the interests of the younger suffragists.

The two major impediments to the merger were allotment of blame for the 1869 split and the selection of a president for the reunited association. Although not present, Stanton figured prominently in these discussions. Finally the negotiators decided not to refer to the schism and to elect someone other than the three troublemakers. All three of the senior women agreed but no alternative candidate was proposed. Meanwhile Mrs. Stanton objected
to a section of the proposed constitution allowing men to hold office. The woman who had voted against a female president for the 1848 Rochester meeting now declared:

I would never vote for a man to any office in our societies, not, however, because I am “down on” men
per se
. Think of an association of black men officered by slave holders! Having men pray or preside for us at our meetings has always seemed to me a tacit admission that we haven’t the brains to do these things ourselves. . . . On the whole I find the suggested constitution very wordy and obscure. It is a very mannish document. It makes my head whirl to read it.
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The committee did not change its position on male officers and merger plans advanced on schedule.

In February 1890 the National and American Woman Suffrage associations met in Washington, D.C., to merge into the National American Woman Suffrage Association. Lucy Stone claimed to be too ill to attend, but her husband and daughter were present. Mrs. Stanton’s presence had been guaranteed by scheduling a tribute to Anthony and by inviting her to make a congressional address. Both of Stanton’s daughters came for the three events.
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Stanton began the month by testifying before the Senate Select Committee on Woman Suffrage. She tried to counter the argument that women were unsuited for public life by dismissing the “separate spheres” theory of male and female behavior. Stanton believed that both sexes were mentally equal and therefore should have equal legal rights. She discounted biological and physical differences, asserting that lawmakers did not need to interfere with God’s handiwork: if a woman was capable of doing something, then God must have intended that she should. Finally she raised the difficulty of artificially defining male or female spheres. “I find men in many avocations—washing, cooking, selling needles and tape over a counter—which might be considered the work of women. The consideration of questions of legislation, finance, free trade, etc., certainly would not degrade woman, nor is her refinement so evanescent a virtue that it could be swept away by some work which she might do with her hands.”
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Stanton repeated her testimony before the House Judiciary Committee, which issued its first majority report favoring a federal amendment to enfranchise women.

The next big event—the celebration of Anthony’s seventieth birthday—occurred a few days later, on February 15, 1890. Designed to be both a personal tribute and a political maneuver, the celebration was the first public evidence that the younger suffragists would accept Anthony’s leadership over that of Stanton or Stone. It was a festive, emotional occasion. After a lavish banquet for two hundred at the Riggs House, Mrs. Stanton rose to give the main address, on “The Friendship of Women.” With good humor
and genuine feeling, she honored her friend as “the most charitable, self-reliant, magnanimous human being that I ever knew. . . . Miss Anthony’s grand life is a lesson to all unmarried women, showing that the love-element need not be wholly lost if it is not centered on husband and children. To live for a principle, for the triumph of some reform by which all mankind are to be lifted up—to be wedded to an idea—may be, after all, the holiest and happiest of marriages”
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Anthony replied in kind, but within days the two old friends were challenging each other for leadership of the new association.

The delicate question of the presidency of the National American Woman Suffrage Association had not been resolved when the two groups convened on February 17, 1890. Lucy Stone had forbidden the use of her name. Stanton and Anthony also claimed to be willing to withdraw. Rumors reported that Anthony had made a deal with former American members, offering herself as a compromise candidate, less controversial and more acceptable than Stanton. When both women were nominated for the office, neither declined. Stanton’s supporters wanted to recognize her seniority and superior talents. Opponents claimed that she was too old and too often in Europe. Anthony defended Stanton’s nomination.

I will say to every woman who is a National and who has any love for the old Association, or for Susan B. Anthony, that I hope you will not vote for her for President. . . . Don’t vote for any human being but Mrs. Stanton. . . . When the division [between the National and the American] was made twenty-two years ago it was because our platform was too broad, because Mrs. Stanton was too radical. . . . If Mrs. Stanton shall be deposed . . . you virtually degrade her. . . . I want our platform to be kept broad enough for the infidel, the atheist.

But Anthony did not withdraw her name. The vote was 131 for Stanton, 90 for Anthony. Anthony was elected vice-president-at-large with 213 votes, and Lucy Stone became head of the executive committee on a unanimous motion.
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Aware of the complaints about her absenteeism, Stanton opened her inaugural remarks by declaring, “I consider it a greater honor to go to England as President of this Association than would be the case if I were sent as Minister Plenipotentiary to any court in Europe.” Then she reviewed the history of the women’s rights movement and graciously mentioned her old antagonist Lucy Stone before tackling the narrow-mindedness of the new organization. Rather than limit their platform, Stanton wanted to extend it: “Whenever a woman is wronged, her voice should be heard on our platform.” She wanted NAWSA to be inclusive rather than exclusive, to encompass all “types and classes, races and creeds,” including “Mormon, Indian, and black women.”
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Although the organization may have become
more conservative, Stanton saw no reason to mute her appeals to its formerly liberal leanings.

When Stanton arose the next day to say farewell, her audience waved their handkerchiefs and cheered. Many of them were relieved that she was returning to England and that Anthony would replace her as acting president. Stanton was just as glad to get away. She was filled with misgivings about the merger. She distrusted the infiltration of temperance women, recognizing that the possibility of prohibition imposed by female voters would generate antisuffrage sentiment among male voters. As she complained to Clara Colby, “Frances Willard needs watching. She is a politician.” Nor did Stanton like the singing and praying that had been added to meeting programs at the insistence of their pious new allies, and she opposed their crusade for Sunday closing laws. But her major concern was the intolerance of the conservative majority. In her view, it had been a “mistake” to take them in as equal partners. As she confided to Mrs. Colby, once they had “absolute control,” they would “kill” her and “whoever else dares to differ.”
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The policies of the new organization and the attitudes of the younger suffragists effectively shut Stanton out, so she voluntarily removed herself.

Stanton enjoyed her return trip to England but could not resist commenting that an intelligent woman graduate could design better ships. She was accompanied by Harriot Blatch, eighteen pieces of baggage, and the phaeton, broken down and packed in six crates. She visited her friends among English suffragists, made several speeches, entertained visitors, drafted articles, and “talked on all manner of topics, radical and otherwise.” She attended the theater in London, observing that she saw few other people “on the shady side of seventy drinking in these worldly joys at the midnight hour.” Most of all, she enjoyed family pleasures.

I find Hattie’s home truly delightful. Nora plays and laughs and romps all day as happy as a lark. Hattie and I drive every day from eleven to half past one [and] after dinner I take a nap. Nora goes to school and Hattie [pregnant] is taking life easy. I am trying to teach her the beauty of repose, rest, the recumbent posture. People in general term it so praiseworthy to keep their eyelids forever stretched open to their full capacity, standing on tip-toe on the watch tower of mortal anxiety about some trifle. But my gospel is to preserve the horizontal as opportunity offers and cultivate laziness as a virtue when you are unable to work.
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